JayKay wrote:I also have heard of there being a direct train route for wounded WW1 soldiers in Glasgow.

The difference is that I heard it was Stobhill Hospital, which does have a (now disused) rail line beside it. This line would have connected to the Glasgow/Edinburgh line at Springburn. Some of this disused line is still visible off Glasgow Road in Springburn.

I had also heard that this direct train line to the hospital existed so that civillian morale would not have been adversely affected by seeing what was happening to the soldiers at the front.

Hey JayKay this line was actualy part of the Caledonian Railway Hamiltonhill Branch, it didnt connect to the E&G but it did pass over it via a bridge that was removed in the late 70s. To the west of the E&G the line divided at Possil Junction to the Lanarkshire & Dumbartonshire railway and then continued on crossing over the North British Dumbarton & Helensburgh Branch. To the east of the E&G the line did run past Stobhill but there was never any station there (not that I can find). The line then joined up to the section of track that runs from Springburn to Stepps which was the LMS route from Glasgow Buchanan Street station (long gone).

I can upload some scans of the line from 1913 if you want, however you can still trace the track bed on google maps.

In September 1914, at the beginning of the first world war, the hospital was requisitioned by the Royal Army Medical Corps and the first batch of wounded servicemen arrived by specially converted 'ambulance train' at a temporary railway platform built within the grounds. It ran round the back of Stobhill Hospital, just at Littlehill Golf Club.

There's a 1 storey deep hole by the side of the clock tower, under the small bridge. Sadly, no secret tunnel though. Was this a station in a steep cutting, a siding, or just a hole in the ground?

Nothing seems to show up on any old maps I've seen, like the one above.

Not that it helps place exactly where the trains stopped at the hospital, but there are several pics on the Virtual Mitchell site of the first train being unloaded. It does look in a couple of the pics as if the soldiers are being unloaded from the train then put into ambulances, so I would guess that the station was built alongside the existing railway line rather than a branch going into the hospital itself. Should add that I used to walk along that old track bed quite regular and there was never any sign of anything veering off it towards Stobhill.

Guacho wrote:Tiny part of the map, hopefully shows where the trains with the wounded wentInterestingly, this is the 1913 version...........

If you mean the line branching off under the clock tower then, no, I can't believe that's where the wounded were unloaded. That's just a small goods line leading to the stores. It would have been completely impractical as, once unloaded and brought into the stores, the wounded would have to have been stretchered up a small set of stairs, loaded into a freight lift, gone up one storey, then transported in to the hospital.

I did a bit of digging, and what I discovered corroborates my previous two posts on this subject:

"It was commonly believed that wounded personnel were brought into the hospital by train via the railway line, which until it was removed ran right up to the boiler house. While it is true that patients were brought by rail directly to the hospital grounds, they disembarked at a temporary railway platform which was erected at the side of the railway line adjacent to the old Mortuary. This arrangement expedited the arrival at the hospital in two ways, viz., the train could be re-routed to avoid going through the centre of the city and it could proceed directly into the hospital grounds".

This map shows the position of the original mortuary:

...and this 1960's aerial shows the close proximity of the former railway line to the mortuary:

Contemporary newspaper reports from September 1914 detail the arrival of the first war wounded patients to Stobhill:

"The first big contingent of wounded soldiers to reach Glasgow arrived on Sunday night by two special ambulance trains from Southampton, the first at 10 o'clock and the second an hour later. As Stobhill Hospital is now devoted to military purposes, a temporary railway platform has been erected in the grounds, and trains from London can be diverted from the main line at a point in the suburbs of the city so as to proceed direct to the hospital. This diversion of the trains at Rutherglen avoids passing through the centre of Glasgow, and consequently only railway officials and the Stobhill staff were aware of arrival of so many wounded in the city. The most serious injured - there were only a few who required stretchers -were conveyed from the temporary station to the hospital in St. Andrew's Ambulance wagons".

The newspaper reports go on to tell us that the first batch of arrivals consisted of 200 men, which regiments they were from, and the severity of their injuries. There certainly doesn't appear to have been any attempt to hide the truth for fear of crushing morale.